Finding the future: three approaches to the problems in Aboriginal communities

Nulloo Yumbah, A Place of Indigenous Learning and Research, is a Support, Research and Development Centre of Central Queensland University. The University has recently established The CQU-Nulloo Yumbah Annual lecture series. The lectures are intended to have a focus on reconciliation and will be given in alternate years by an indigenous and a non-indigenous speaker. The following is an extract from the inaugural lecture, given in Rockhampton on 1 May 2002 by Hal Wootten QC AC. An expanded and annotated version of the lecture will be published as a monograph by CQU.

In 1972 the Whitlam Government initiated what became a bipartisan consensus in Aboriginal policy. It was founded on a recognition that Aboriginal people were the most socioeconomically disadvantaged within Australia, as shown by statistics on health, life expectancy, education, housing, employment, income and imprisonment, and it accepted that this state of affairs was the end result of colonial dispossession and subsequent government policies. There was support for substantial expenditure to redress social and economic disadvantage. The old assimilation policy was replaced by self-determination, and respect for Aboriginal identity, cultural aspirations, heritage and land rights.

Despite the Howard Government’s rejection of parts of the consensus, substantial expenditure to remedy Aboriginal disadvantage has continued, and ATSIC and native title have not been repealed.

For roughly a quarter of a century there was little public questioning of the consensus, and a widespread acquiescence in the substantial expenditure involved. But this was based on an assumption that it would achieve its objectives, and the internationally embarrassing statistical gap between black and white Australia would substantially diminish within a reasonable time.

Overall the gap has not narrowed, few of the statistics have improved, and some have got worse. Most disturbing are accounts of Aboriginal communities with widespread alcohol and drug abuse; petrol, paint and glue sniffing; chronic welfare dependency; family breakdown; neglect of children; youth suicide; violence and physical and sexual abuse of women and children. While remote communities are most severely affected, most communities appear to suffer these problems in some degree.

I will discuss three responses to this situation – what I will call for want of better terms the Left, the Right and community reform.

The Left have an honourable record in fighting for rights and for government assistance, but faced by the crisis in the communities, they have mostly put their heads in the sands, and are all too ready to accuse anyone who tries to discuss the problems of ‘blaming the victim’. They concentrate on the ‘rights agenda’, and focus on constitutional amendments and treaties, which, whatever their ultimate value, send no useful message to the communities about today’s problems.

Aboriginal history is reduced to a simple story of colonial oppression, of which current problems are symptoms. But for the last 30 years policy has sought to improve the lot of Aboriginals and to increase the say they have over their lives. The efforts may often have been inadequate, stupid and ham-fisted, bureaucratic, or racist, but they have changed the questions that need to be asked.

It is no longer a question of why Aboriginals are shot but why they die early from life-style diseases or take their own lives; no longer why Aboriginal children are not allowed into proper schools, but why many children won’t go to them; no longer why Aboriginals are starving, but why so many choose fast foods and soft drinks that shorten their lives; no longer why they don’t have houses but why houses don’t last; no longer why they are denied the right to drink, but why so many drink to excess.

The Right say that the problems are caused by welfare and by self-determination; we should have stuck to assimilation or integration, and insisted that Aboriginals work. In essence they see a choice between the primitive culture that Aboriginals had and modern industrial society; the job is to move Aboriginals from one to the other as quickly as possible, with none of the self-determination nonsense that makes people think there is any alternative.

This approach is arrogant, and unworkable because it gives at best only a token recognition to the Aboriginal identity that is so precious and tenacious. It speaks about culture as if it were some fixed thing that can be put on or taken off like a uniform. Culture changes every day as society is shaped by the myriads of choices that its members make or refrain from making as they go about their lives.

When one society comes into contact with another, members of each get attracted to features of the other. Aboriginal societies were so long cut off from modernised societies that when contact finally came, they found many attractive novelties – flour, sugar, tea, beef, soft drink and alcohol, firearms, Toyotas, aeroplane, writing, new artistic forms, new sports, professional and other interesting careers, science, organised religions…. Some were easily adopted; some had too high a price; some, like alcohol, brought fundamental disruptions to their societies.

The dominant society tried to control the choices made by Indigenous people, sometimes selfishly, sometimes with good intentions, sometimes with racial or cultural arrogance. Attempts were made, with varying degrees of compulsion and cruelty, to constrain Indigenous choices by imposing an overall direction and speed of change. Assimilation was such a policy, when Aboriginals were allowed only one choice, to mimic the white majority.

Assimilation policies were abandoned not only because they were demeaning and racist, and often cruel, but because they didn’t work. They undermined the traditional structures that once held communities together but failed to provide a substitute, as became apparent when the authoritarian missionaries and superintendents departed.

Welfare dependency is not something that Aboriginals chose, or were seduced into by self-determination. Their niches of employment in the pre-welfare era were largely destroyed by economic changes in the 1960s and 1970s. Poor education, discrimination, geographical isolation and attachment to home communities made most Aboriginals uncompetitive for such jobs as were available. Meanwhile alcohol became legally available and insinuated itself deeply into Aboriginal life.

Suddenly unemployment benefits became available as part of a new equality in citizens’ rights. It was a novel concept: ‘sit down money’, i.e. payment for doing nothing. Few Aboriginals had an understanding of the economy, let alone the theory of the welfare state, in which the payments were intended as temporary relief between the jobs that would normally be available. This central promise of the welfare state – regular employment – has never been taken seriously in relation to Aboriginal communities. As Noel Pearson has emphasised, few have had access to a ‘real’ economy.

Self-determination was intended to reverse the destructive paternalism of assimilation; not to encourage separatism, or discourage change, but to give Aborigines the chance, as individuals or as members of families and communities, to make the decisions about their lives and communities that protection and assimilation policies had placed in the hands of others. Today however, many feel that this is the opposite of what has happened. People in communities say that they have lost control of their lives – lost it to funding authorities; lost it to bureaucratic processes; lost it to those who can capture and manipulate organisations; lost it to experts, whose claim to expertise is sometimes only the colour of their skin; lost it to alcohol; lost it to the drunk and violent and loud-mouthed minority; lost it to the paralysis that comes when one cannot see a future worth working for.

There are many reasons self-determination has not delivered its promise. They add up to the fact that, for all the lip service, it has rarely been seriously implemented. It is not some state of grace, or political status, that government can confer on people who are thenceforth permitted and qualified to make whatever decisions they please. It is a process that takes place whenever a person, family or community makes a decision about their own affairs, instead of having it made for them by a superintendent or missionary or anyone else. It may be as simple as accepting or refusing a drink; as insisting a child go to school; as growing some fruit and vegetables; as weaning a child off soft drinks and fast food; as voting a corrupt office-bearer out of office; or as mobilising a community to condemn and if necessary charge those who disrupt its life, damage its buildings, drink its income or molest its women and children. On the other hand it may be as impressive as campaigning for a national apology or for a treaty. Aboriginal people, like other self-determining people, have to decide where their immediate priorities are.

The ideological voices of the Left and the Right have tended to drown out a third voice, the people in the communities, who have been sending out two messages: One is that grog is ruining their communities – leading to violence, murder, sexual abuse, wrecked houses, no money for good food, sleepless hungry children who can’t compete at school, won’t take any notice of their parents, grow up seeing no future and end up in gaol or take their own lives. The other is that they want real jobs for their kids.

For many years few took them seriously. Too many of us have thought we knew better what they needed – more grandiose forms of self-determination, apologies, bigger and better rights, constitutional amendments, treaties, whatever we thought were the big issues. Noel Pearson will go down in history because he listened, thought and wrote and lobbied. Recently John Ah Kit, as a Minister in the Northern Territory Government, has followed his lead in acknowledging the problems, and started his own search for solutions.

Pearson showed that in Cape York at least the priority must be getting on top of the grog, because it causes or exacerbates or prevents the solution of every other problem. He also called for the reassertion of the personal responsibility that has been undermined by generations of welfare dependence, and a search for ways to escape that dependence through re-engagement with a real economy. His detailed proposals emphasise that government assistance is still needed but must be given in new ways.

Few have read his intellectually powerful work, but many, black and white, judge it from sensational media grabs. On the Left they ignore it, dismiss it as ‘blaming the victim’ or attack its author; on the Right they selectively hijack it for ideological use.

Premier Beattie listened to Pearson, formed Cape York Partnerships, and sought Tony Fitzgerald’s recommendations on the grog situation. Beattie’s response, Meeting Challenges, Making Choices promises the first serious attempt to empower Aboriginal communities to find a future.. It offers a framework of law and government partnership within which people in the communities can themselves make effective choices.

Successful change depends on community members, alone or in families or groups, summoning the will to tackle the problems. It will be difficult and painful, particularly in a society that respects personal autonomy so strongly, particularly when it means confronting kin and resisting their demands, particularly for people whose exercise of will has been historically undermined. Hope lies in the many people in communities all over Australia who have maintained control over their lives, people we hear little of in all the accounts of disintegrating communities, some of them people who have courageously formed night patrols, justice groups, youth groups and other forms of resistance to grog and despair.

I called my lecture ‘Finding the future’ because I believe that Aboriginal people must find their own futures. The role of the rest of us, the white community, is to make room for them; to negotiate when they come to boundaries, to offer friendship; to share knowledge, experience and resources; to welcome and encourage participation in institutions, associations and activities; to listen and learn; to be sensitive and respectful of difference; to pressure governments. For example, white parents can help Aboriginal children feel comfortable and welcome in schools by forestalling the unthinking cruelties of their own children, fostering friendships and inclusion in activities, encouraging Aboriginal parents to take part, listening to them and working with them to make the school rewarding for all children.

It is not for us or our governments to pre-empt the myriad choices that open to Aboriginals as they seek their futures, whether as individuals or as members of communities. There are enough constraints imposed by the real world, where choices are always limited by scarce resources, by the rights and interests of others, by law, by the needs of one’s family, by the trade-offs in every decision that is made.